xvii, 454 pages ; 23 cm

"'Audio Culture : Readings in Modern Music' maps the aural and discursive terrain of vanguard music today. Rather than offering a history of contemporary music, it traces the genealogy of current musical practices and theoretical concerns, drawing lines of connection between today's radical music and earlier moments of sonic experimentation. Via writings by composers, philosophers and cultural theorists, 'Audio Culture' explores the interconnections among such musical forms as minimalism, indeterminacy, musique concrete, free improvisation, experimental music, avant-rock, dub reggae, Ambient music, HipHop and Techno. It aims to foreground the various rewiring of musical composition and performance that have taken place in the past few decades and to provide a critical and theoretical language for this new culture of sound."--Back cover

Includes discography (pages 419-425), bibliographical references (p. 427-443) , and index

pt. 1. Theories. I. Music and its others : noise, sound, silence. Noise and politics / Jacques Attali -- The art of noises : futurist manifesto / Luigi Russolo -- Sound, noise, Varèse, Boulez / Morton Feldman -- The liberation of sound / Edgard Varèse -- The joys of noise / Henry Cowell -- The future of music : credo / John Cage -- The music of the environment / R. Murray Schafer -- Listening for silence : notes on the aural life / Mark Slouka -- Rough music, futurism, and postpunk industrial noise bands / Mary Russo and Daniel Warner -- Noise / Simon Reynolds -- The beauty of noise : an interview with Masami Akita of Merzbow

II. Modes of listening. Visual and acoustic space / Marshall McLuhan -- The politics of hearing / Hanns Eisler & Theodor Adorno -- Acousmatics / Pierre Schaeffer -- Profound listening and environmental sound matter / Francisco López -- Adequate modes of listening / Ola Stockfelt -- Ambient music / Brian Eno -- The aural walk / Iain Chambers -- Some sound observations / Pauline Oliveros -- Compose yourself / J.K. Randall

III. Music in the age of electronic reproduction. The prospects of recording / Glenn Gould -- The studio as compositional tool / Brian Eno -- Bettered by the borrower : the ethics of musical debt / John Oswald -- Plunderphonia / Chris Cutler -- Operating system for the redesign of sonic reality / Kodwo Eshun

pt. 2. Practices. IV. The open work. The poetics of the open work / Umberto Eco -- Composition as process : indeterminacy / John Cage -- Visual sounds : on graphic scores / Christoph Cox -- Transformations and developments of a radical aesthetic / Earle Brown -- The game pieces / John Zorn -- Introduction to Catalog of works / Anthony Braxton

V. Experimental musics. Towards (a definition of) experimental music / Michael Nyman -- Introduction to Themes & variations / John Cage -- Generating and organizing variety in the arts / Brian Eno -- A scratch orchestra : draft constitution / Cornelius Cardew -- The generation game : experimental music and digital culture / David Toop

VI. Improvised musics. Change of the century / Ornette Coleman -- Free improvisation / Derek Bailey -- Little bangs : a nihilist theory of improvisation / Frederic Rzewski -- Improvised music after 1950 : afrological and eurological perspectives / George E. Lewis

VII. Minimalisms. Rap, minimalism and structures of time in late twentieth-century culture / Susan McClary -- Thankless attempts at a definition of minimalism / Kyle Gann -- Music as a gradual process / Steve Reich -- Basic concepts of minimal music / Wim Mertens -- LYssophobia : on Four violins / Tony Conrad -- Digital discipline : minimalism in house and techno / Philip Sherburne

VIII. DJ Culture. Production-reproduction : potentialities of the phonograph / László Moholy-Nagy -- The invisible generation / William S. Burroughs -- Record, CD, analog, digital / Christian Marclay & Yasunao Tone -- Algorithms : erasures and the art of memory / Paul D. Miller -- Replicant : on dub / David Toop -- Post-rock / Simon Reynolds

IX. Electronic music and electronica. Introductory remarks to a program of works produced at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center / Jacques Barzun -- Electronic and instrumental music / Karlheinz Stockhausen -- Stockhausen vs. the technocrats / Karlheinz Stockhausen et al. -- Breakthrough beats : rhythm and the aesthetics of contemporary electronic music / Ben Neill -- The aesthetics of failure : 'post-digital' tendencies in contemporary computer music / Kim Cascone

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